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Thursday, April 20, 2017

Museums | Holocaust | Exhibitions

By NINA SIEGAL

Anne Frank in 1939, six years before her death.Credit
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

AMSTERDAM — “She hid Jews?”

Aleatha
Hinds, 17, ventured a guess about Anne Frank’s identity as she waited
in line for two hours recently to enter the museum devoted to that
world-famous diarist, who hid with her family in a secret annex for 25
months during World War II.

“No,
no, no!” replied several friends, all 11th and 12th graders from the
St. Charles College high school in Ontario. “She was Jewish!” they
corrected her, in unison.

“She
was hiding in her father’s factory,” said Eric LeBreton, 16. “The Nazis
were looking for all the Jewish people because Hitler was trying to do
genocide.”

With attendance swelling to 1.3 million annually, from one million in 2010, the Anne Frank House
has begun reckoning with a striking dimension of its popularity: Many
of the younger and foreign visitors who flock here nonetheless have
little knowledge of the Holocaust — and sometimes none about Frank. The
museum and some others dedicated to Jewish life are seeking new ways to
address a declining understanding of World War II and the genocide that
took the lives of six million Jews in Europe, efforts that have increasing relevance as anti-Semitic incidents intensify across parts of Europe and the United States. Read more...